no subject

With regards to cost, the Wordpress blog platform is free to everyone at wordpress.org. So the cost of webhosting (which will also include free domain name registration), runs as cheap as $3.95 per month is a great deal!

With regards to maintenance, that will depend on your comfort level with dealing with websites (not necessarily dealing with html code) and the amount of time you want to spend with your site maintenance. I like LJ very much, but I find what I can do with it, in comparison to my other website -- which I am moving to a blog platform that I will have customized for re-launch by mid-March -- is so limited. My comfort level with setting up the database which runs the blog, as well as installing all of the software upgrades, themes, and plugins that make a blog functional, is above average. So where I love tinkering with website and now blog platforms, others may not like dealing with it.